I'd pick Octavian over HG, but I think it's a mistake to ignore the depth in HG, the way it sets up the voyeurism of reality TV and then makes the reader complicit in that voyeurism -- the complicated relations between real actions and feelings, and simulacra of those actions and feelings.

Probably the work of Bowles and Gintis et.al. that uses game theortic methods to evaluate extensive data gathered in HG societies which show evolutionarily stable possibility for such "hard wired" traits.